¿Que Es Esso?
Bienvenue au mon premier blog au Marrakech, Maroc.
Yes, I’ve moved! Welcome to beautiful Marrakech, Morocco. Apologies for the delay in the blog but moving from the southern most country in Africa to one of the northern most takes a bit of time and adjusting.
So, I now live in Morocco? How is that going? Well in short, great. I will admit Morocco was one of the countries I was most nervous visiting because in my mind it was going to be the furthest departure from my Western norms, but honestly, I’ve found the opposite. Morocco and Marrakech are extremely modern, thriving and welcoming.
And now the next question I always get asked? Safety? How do you feel about being a woman in a Muslim country? Well again, great. I have not once felt unsafe, harassed or catcalled (a stark contrast to Cape Town where that was sometimes a daily occurrence). I do not need to where a burka or a hijab or be overly concerned about wearing shorts (frankly I haven’t worn them much because Marrakech has been having a bit of a cold spell). I can walk after 7pm, when it’s dark, another thing I couldn’t do in Cape Town. The people of Morocco have been nothing but kind and welcoming to me since I entered this country.
How you say? Well here is a great example.
Last Wednesday as part of my track (a track is a curated event made by Remote Year that is included in our monthly fee — we have three events a month) we were invited to have dinner with a local family in their home on the outskirts of Marrakech. The meal in short was to die for and we got to make bread with grandma, which was such a treat. Thank you to Safaa and her family for an amazing experience.
But it wasn’t just that meal and sense of being welcomed, it was the whole evening. The evening started off a bit rough and we experienced what we in the Remote Year world call Level 3 Fun (refer to my friend Andrew’s blog on what that specifically entails — CLICK HERE his blog rocks too), but in short Level 3 Fun is when things just go all kinds of wrong, but it ends up being one of the best nights of your life, well that was our night at Grandma’s last Wednesday.
I had an extremely busy day at work and had to leave about 3 hours earlier than normal to get to dinner. So, I rushed out of our co-working space and was still answering messages on my walk back home when one of my fellow Remotes said, “Excuse me for a second” and proceeded to throw up in the bushes on Avenue Mohammed VI. Now I must say he was very discreet about it, but given we were about to go to a dinner I didn’t think he would be joining us. But as we walked the rest of the way home he said he seemed to be feeling better, so we continued onto Grandma’s house (now at this point we were about 45 minutes late due to the vomiting and waiting for another Remote who ended up not showing).
Now I’m already feeling kind of shitty about being 45 minutes late to this dinner, but frankly it couldn’t be avoided. The bus drops us off in a residential neighborhood (it looked like Van Nuys) and the driver says in broken English (because the national language in Morocco if you didn’t know is French and Arabic) “You go here, I’ll get you at 10:30” and points to 10:30 on a piece of paper. We agree and get out of the bus and realize we are in front of an 8ft gate and the sounds of 5 barking dogs behind it. At this point I’m a bit afraid (love dogs, but 5 furious ones, no thank you), so we call our city team who in a few minutes points us in the right direction of Grandma’s house.
A lovely woman meets us at the gate to her house and says in French “Je ne parle pas beaucoup d’anglais” (I don’t speak a lot of English). So, at this point I’m like crap, I’m going to have to translate. I took 6 years of French in school and was fluent at one point, but that was well over 10 years ago. Unfortunately, though I am with others who have never taken the language….so I just knew I’d be in for an interesting evening already.
After some pleasantries and easy to answer questions my very eager fellow Remotes wanted to ask some more heavy hitting questions (that’s what you get when one of them was a Journalism major), so thankfully Google Translate to the rescue. Now it’s not the best app in the world, but it gets the gist, so for the remainder of the night they would type out questions they’d want to ask, and I’d translate back the responses and the hosts questions, which saved me from having to remember the past participial of several irregular verbs.
Now as we’re getting to know our host my stomach-sick Remote is starting to feel worse again — he’s literally starting to blanche (get white faced) and at one point he’s like I need to lie down. And the lovely hosts to the rescue — they made him a makeshift bed on the Moroccan couches and he proceeded to sleep through the entire night. The host even gave him her homemade cure for upset tummies — cumin. It wasn’t until we were about to go when he essentially rose from the ashes after hearing there were strawberries and then proceeded to eat 15 of them, who knew strawberries were the cure.
Now if google translate and a sick Remote on the couch wasn’t enough, the next part was even more amusing. As we were waiting for dinner to be served the host’s children came over with some toys and one of the other Remotes there has nieces and nephews, so naturally she wanted to interact with the children. And then somewhere out of left field she asks “¿Que es esso?”, which is not French at all and is Spanish for “What is this?” We all just proceeded to burst out laughing into the point of tears. Here we were in a country that was completely new to us and were using google translate, we have a sick Remote on the couch, the other speaking Spanish to the kids and I’m trying to translate this whole scenario, that’s level 3 fun if I’ve ever seen it.
But throughout all this insanity the host was so kind, generous and never judged us at all. She was the epitome of hospitality and after the crazy day we’ve had it was exactly what we needed.
¿Que es esso? Ma vie.
Since this blog was so late I’ll post another one this week. See you all then.
Peace. Love. Ohana.
